Saturday, August 20, 2005

Flights of Fantasy

My longtime friend Joe Brancatelli runs an excellent website about travel, aiming primarily at the airlines and all that they do wrong. It costs a few bucks to access Joe's site but it yields much valuable info, plus you get e-mailed updates. I just received one that Joe said I could share with you here...

I've just posted several new items at JoeSentMe.com about the first day of the Northwest Airlines mechanics strike. The bottom line: Of 99 flights I tracked at random on Saturday, Northwest racked up a miserable 46.5 percent on-time rating. And this was Saturday, the light day. By Sunday evening and Monday morning, when business travelers have to get back on the road, things will probably be worse.

Bottom line: Despite what you may be hearing in the general media, which merely repeats Northwest management assertions without actually checking the stats Northwest itself is publishing on its flight tracker, this bears all the hallmarks of a 2000-style United Airlines meltdown.

Joe is updating the stats on his site. I would tend to believe him before I'd believe the press coverage that quotes airline execs as saying all is well.

• Posted at 10:25 PM · LINK

Clarification

To answer several inquiries: No, I did not post the "pledge break" because I'm planning on buying the Picasso.

• Posted at 9:30 PM · LINK

Pledge Break...

• Posted at 7:06 PM · LINK

Act Now! Supply is Limited!

Costco is selling another original Picasso. This one goes for $129,999.99 and I'm wondering if the price is because some sort of tax or insurance fee kicks in if it's $130,000 or if someone actually thought, "Hey, let's knock a penny off and make it sound a lot cheaper."

Last time they did this, the web page had the little Costco "quantity" window on it so before you hit the "add to shopping cart" button, you could specify that you wanted two or three or ten of the item. This time, they don't have online ordering but I like the fact that the webpage includes this announcement...

Costco.com products can be returned to any of our more than 400 Costco warehouses worldwide.

Almost makes you want to buy the thing just so you can take it back, go up to Customer Service and say, "I'd like to exchange this for 268 sets of snow tires and a box of frozen calamari."

• Posted at 6:28 PM · LINK

Game Time!

Time to catch up on the late night reruns of What's My Line? on GSN...

The other night, they ran a 1958 episode in which one of the contestants was a man named named Henri LaMothe, whose occupation was given as "High Diver (Dives 40 feet into 2 feet of water)." He later got himself the Guinness Book of World Records for making what they called "The highest shallow dive," plunging 28 feet into twelve inches of water, a feat he set around 1979 and which was only recently bested.

What they didn't mention on the show and what I found especially interesting about the man was that, first of all, high-diving was a sideline occupation. His main line of work was as a doctor. In fact, he learned the high-diving trick — a special way of contorting your body when you hit the water — when he attended a medical school with a very shallow pool. Secondly, he was doing this dive well into senior citizenry. He was in his forties on the episode of What's My Line? He was in his seventies when he set the world's record...and we had him on a TV show I wrote in the early eighties where, sure enough, he dove from the top of our studio (around 30 feet) into about as much water as I drink in a day. How odd to see him on this old game show. I remember sitting with him in his dressing room thinking, "This man is old enough to be my grandfather and he's about to do something I wouldn't have attempted when I was sixteen."

The What's My Line? Mystery Guests aren't all that interesting in the coming week: Kathryn Grayson tonight, followed by Esther Williams, Van Cliburn, Althea Gibson, Steve & Eydie, and Dick Powell. In a month or so, we should get to a few weeks of very interesting shows to watch.

• Posted at 6:17 PM · LINK

For Big Ones

Hey, you want a handy Internet service? Let's say you have to send a very large file to one or more people. You could e-mail it to each of them but not everyone's e-mail service will accept large files. Moreover, if you're sending it to ten people, that would mean your computer would have to upload it ten times. So whaddaya do? And yes, I know I'm starting to sound like a damn infomercial about this...

You use YouSendIt.com. This is such a great free service that you figure there's got to be a catch...but as far as I can tell, there isn't. You upload the file (up to 1 GB) to their server and enter the e-mail addresses(es) of its intended recipient(s). The site sends messages out to everyone you specify and gives them a link to come and download the file at their leisure. It remains available for seven days and then it's deleted from the YouSendIt server.

Folks say it's safe and secure but if you're concerned that someone will pry into your file, you can use some sort of encryption on it. The easiest would probably be to put it into a password-protected ZIP file, and then e-mail the password to the recipient. You probably have a ZIP program on your computer even if you don't know about it.

I posted this because I thought some of you could make good use of it, but also because I wanted to have one item up here this weekend that doesn't concern Cindy Sheehan.

• Posted at 2:23 PM · LINK

Comics Crossover

The Blondie newspaper strip will be 75 years old on September 8. To celebrate, members of her clan are paying visits to other strips to invite their characters to a big party. The festivities start today and depending on my mood, I may or may not provide links to all the strips involved, which lead up to an appearance in the feature by George W. and Laura Bush on September 4. If Cindy Sheehan is still camped out in Crawford on that date, we will probably hear remarks that Bush is too busy to meet with the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq but he has plenty of time to visit Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead.

In any case, because I promised Len Wein I'd dig up this information, here's the current schedule of crossover strips...

Saturday, August 20: Garfield, Rose is Rose
Sunday, August 21: B.C.
Monday, August 22: Mutts
Tuesday, August 23: Beetle Bailey, Mother Goose and Grimm
Wednesday, August 24: The Family Circus
Saturday, August 27: Hi and Lois
Sunday, August 28: For Better or For Worse, Sally Forth
Wednesday, August 31: The Family Circus
Friday, September 2: The Lockhorns
Saturday, September 3: Dennis the Menace
August 29-September 3: Curtis
August 29-September 4: Hagar the Horrible
Dates Unknown: Zits, Wizard of Id, Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Bizarro

• Posted at 1:35 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Jim Jurgensen (who doesn't capitalize his name but I will) writes...

1. Cindy Sheehan seems to yuck it up quite a bit for a person who had her son killed.

2. Seeing her holding a Pro-Palestine sign bobbing it up-and-down like she's at a political convention with a big smile on her face makes me think twice about her motives...or someone else's agenda she's been sucked into or milk it long enough for a nice book deal.

I guess what it comes down to for me is that though I'm sorry Ms. Sheehan lost her son, ultimately I don't think her motives or personal integrity matter that much. In my e-mailbox and when I go to certain websites, I am assaulted by arguments that there's something wrong with the woman...that she's nuts or a Communist or someone's puppet or lying or whatever. Many of the assailants seem to want me to leap from that to the notion that there's something wrong with all criticisms of the current U.S. effort in Iraq.

This is not to suggest Cindy Sheehan is everything (or even anything) her detractors say she is. But even if she is, so what? At worst, she's one human being who's getting way too much media attention. Someone else wrote me that what she's doing is a "stunt." Okay, fine. It's a stunt. All protest demonstrations are. The idea is to call attention to your cause, and in that she seems to be succeeding, which is why I think she's generally been a positive force. She's caused a few more people to begin thinking and talking about Iraq.

Which is good because we need to talk more what's going on Iraq. I spend more time following the news than most people and I'm getting foggier and foggier on why we're there, what will constitute a genuine success that will justify the costs (both human and financial) and just how our leaders think we're going to get to that. If I sound forgiving of Ms. Sheehan's evident confusions, it may be because I'm confused about Iraq, myself. I don't think George W. Bush should go down to Camp Casey (or whatever they're calling it) and explain to her what Americans are dying for. I think he ought to go on TV and tell us all...and on a level that goes deeper than robotic talking points like, "We have to show the world that we mean business." Several polls now show 55% of Americans think going to war in Iraq was a mistake and that number's going to go up, not down. If there are good reasons we're there, Bush needs to do a better job of reminding people what they are.

Because that stuff's important. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being a matter of critical concern, the rationale for war is at least 8.5, maybe nine. Questions about Cindy Sheehan's personal life and whether she's looking for a book deal are barely a one, if that. If she bothers you, just ignore her the way you ignored the Scott Peterson case or the search for the Runaway Bride or, if you're smarter than I am, the Michael Jackson trial. I fear much of America is about to make the same mistake that many made during the Vietnam War. It was to get more emotional and interested in the protests than in what they were protesting. In the long run, Cindy Sheehan doesn't matter. What we do in Iraq does.

• Posted at 1:48 AM · LINK

August 21, 2005 • Current • August 19, 2005